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Re: Participle or Gerund..

Hello, rambharosey.
'banning' in your sentence is a 'present participle'. (And I agree with you that 'smoking' is a noun (gerund).)

"Laws (banning smoking in public places) are about to be passed."

Those words in parentheses (which I think are called a 'participle clause') above postmodify the noun 'Laws'. They describe what kind of 'laws' they are. Therefore they function adjectivally. It is very much like a relative clause:

"Laws (which ban smoking in public places) are about to be passed."

I hope you'll understand what I mean.
(I'm sorry that I cannot explain well enough how to distinguish the difference between 'participles' and 'gerunds'.)

Re: Participle or Gerund..

Originally Posted by tzfujimino

(I'm sorry that I cannot explain well enough how to distinguish the difference between 'participles' and 'gerunds'.)

Please don't apologise for that. I have been teaching for some 45 years now, and I still can't, with 100% accuracy, always identify what some would claim to be gerunds (or participles). My excuse is that I see little point in labelling for the sake of labelling. I see my job as helping learners to speak/write/understand English, not to be able to label words. Most of my students have been able to survive with 'the -ing form'.